A Strange Gallery
by JessTalksAlot
Summary: Strange happenings have been occurring at an art exhibit mostly only wealthy families can enter. When those working at the exhibit have had enough, they hire a group of four wizards and a cat to assist...if only they knew what they were getting into.
1. Chapter 1: Guertena's Gallery

**Thanks for deciding to read this interesting little combination! I'm going to warn you now, Fairy Tail and its characters is an anime I'm still working on, I'm not finished with season 1 as of yet and for whatever reason it is, I'm keeping the point in time relating to the anime close to the beginning to make things simpler, so no worries for spoilers! As you can probably tell, the Fairy Tail characters are not my strong point int his, so please leave any pointers you think would be helpful :)**

**And for people who read my stuff regularily and are wondering why this isn't mentioned on the poll on my page (if you don't know about it go ahead and check it out), it's because I'm kinda posting it so a friend can read it. Enjoy anyway!**

_In a land far, far away lies the kingdom of Fiore, a small, peaceful nation of seventeen million, and a place filled with magic. Found in every home, bought and sold in every marketplace, for most, magic is merely a tool, a mundane part of everyday life. For some, however, magic is an art, and they have devoted their lives to its practice. These are the wizards. Banded together into magical guilds, they apply their skills in search of fame and fortune. Many such guilds dot the landscape of Fiore, but there is a certain guild in a certain town that soars high above the rest, one from which countless legends have been born. A guild that will no doubt continue to create legends well into the future. Its name... is Fairy Tail._

-0-0-0-

"Strange things have been happening at night," a security guard mumbled to another while standing watch over the gallery they worked for. The gallery didn't always exhibit the same art works or artists, but they rotated what displayed. It always seemed strange occurrences began whenever they exhibited the artworks of the late artist Guertena. Those who worked in the gallery would experience odd lapses in memory, odd memories would appear from no where, one worker suddenly awoke from a very frightening hallucination and quit in fear of the bizarre yet beautiful artwork.

When a new manager came into position, he decided he didn't want to risk any more employees leaving, so he decided to post in the many wizard guilds that he needed help here. This included the guild of Fairy Tail. Before long, four formidable wizards and a cat decided to accept this task. This group consisted of dragon slayer Natsu Dragneel, ice maker Gray Fullbuster, celestial wizard Lucy Heartfilia, requip wizard Erza Scarlet, and adorable comedic relief, Happy the cat. In all honesty, it felt like a large group for what seemed like a very miniscule job, but what the hey? I'm the narrator and I don't feel like coming up with an excuse!

In order not to cause a panic, the group would come during the day and just look around the gallery like your average guest would. Lucy was ecstatic. Having seen a few pictures of the artworks in an art book she read through, she felt so honored to see the works in person! And it was such beautiful artwork as well!

On the same day this odd bunch was going to visit the gallery, a young girl, only the age of 9, was also visiting the gallery with her loving mother and father. She was a small girl with long brown hair and nearly crimson eyes. She wore a white dress shirt over a red skirt; around her neck a red ribbon was tied, beneath the skirt were black nylons that reached below her knees and brown shoes that were basically invisible compared to the brightness on top. Stuffed into her pocket was a clean handkerchief with lace trimming with her name, Ib, sewn into one of the corners. When her parents let her explore on her own she did such.

Also in that gallery was a certain young man, the age of 19. He was a college student, an art major. This young man, Garry, was unique in many ways. His head was topped with a light purple mop that covered his left eye and darker, straggly strands sticking all over the place on top, almost like an upside down, wilted flower. Over his normal clothing of a green shirt and khaki pants, was a very rugged looking coat. It's tattered and ripped design was on purpose. Garry liked it that way. The young man was also a light smoker and tended to carry a lighter in his pocket out of habit.

The group of four arrived at the Gallery not long after these two and spit up in pairs. Lucy and Natsu - Happy was hiding inside of Lucy's bag due to a no animals policy - searched on the upper floor, while Erza and Gray looked around on the lower floor.

"Lucy, I really don't see anything weird other than the weird guy with the coat..." Natsu noted after about ten minutes. He paused a moment when something caught his eye, "Oh look!" Without really thinking, the more hyperactive wizard ran ahead of her and around a corner.

"Natsu, wait!" Lucy sighed, "He's so childish."

"Something...world..." a young voice mumbled.

Lucy turned her head to look towards where the voice came from. Ib stood, staring up at a large painting that had several different styles painted across it. She saw a splotches similar to some statues and paintings she had seen in the gallery, in fact. The weird thing was, she hadn't seen the girl nor the painting until just then. Was she really paying that little attention?

Lucy looked at the plaque beneath he painting, assuming the small girl was trying to read it. "_Fabricated World_", Lucy read aloud, "That's what it says."

Ib turned her head towards Lucy and smiled gently, "Thank you, miss." This brought a smile to Lucy's face and she mentally commented on how polite the girl was.

As she went to catch up with Natsu, the lights suddenly flickered. Both girls looked up at the light fixture before it flickered off.

-0-0-0-

"Lucy, look at this! This is so weird!" Natsu turned his head expecting to see Lucy standing there. When she wasn't, he went to look around the corner once more. "Lucy, where'd you go?"

No response. "Natsu..." A soft, feminine voice called out to him. Natsu turned around, not seeing anything but the bizarre statue he was staring at previously. "Natsu..."

He blinked. The statues mouth was moving. He stepped closer, "Are you a wizard? And how do you know my name?"

The lights suddenly flickered...

-0-0-0-

"Weren't there more people here before?" Gray noted as he and Erza walked through the gallery that was now empty. After reading a plaque near a statue of a rose out loud, the lights flickered and suddenly the duo was alone.

"This is quite strange." Erza noted. The two walked around for a bit more until the lights dimmed.

Gray groaned in exasperation, "Great, now I can't see..."

The two continued walking for a bit longer before Gray stopped hearing Erza's footsteps. He stopped and looked around, "Erza?" No response.

The boy looked around until large splotches of paint appeared on the floor before him. When he looked closer, he saw that the letters read 'Come Gray'. Kind of creepy.

When he left the room, hopefully to find Erza, he noticed a trail of blotchy blue footprints leading throuhg the gallery and the genius in him decided it was a good idea to follow them.

In moments he bumped into Garry who was just as confused as he was. "Any clue what the hell is going on?"

"No." Just then, the painting beside them meowed...

They both took off, tripping over their own feet, "Where is everyone?!" Garry yelped.

Not watching where he was going, Garry ran into Gray who had stopped himself from running into a group of three headless statues, as a result, the two men stumbled into them and the creepy figures reached out and grabbed them. Garry screamed while Gray attempted to get out of their clutches with no success. Soon the world around them was spinning and then there was darkness...


	2. Chapter 2: Roses

"Miss, are you okay?" Ib asked, lightly shaking Lucy's arm. Lucy had hit her head on the descent down through...the floor painting of an angler fish and was knocked cold..which was a bit weird, though Ib landed safely on her feet.

Lucy looked up and rubbed the bump she felt forming on the back of her head, "Yeah...are you?"

Ib nodded and paused for a moment before speaking again, "I'm Ib.."

"I'm Lucy." Lucy replied. She looked around. They sat in a blue hallway. At the end of the hall to her left was a table with a vase with two roses sitting in it, the table blocking a door, while the other way was a dead end. "Stay near me, okay, Ib? We're going to try and find out where we are."

Seeing as there was only one way to possibly leave the hall, Lucy decided on going towards the door. She saw that they needed to push the table out of the way, but she felt like she'd feel bad if she just knocked over the pretty flowers, so she took them out. She noticed that they were two different colors and had a different number of petals. One was red with three petals, one was yellow with red tips with five. "They look pretty..." The roses seemed more vibrant than any she'd seen. They were warm and felt as if they were full of life. She sensed small amounts magic energy coming from the yellow-red one...maybe this had something to do with the weird events?

-0-0-0-

Erza found herself standing in a bizarre room shaped like a cat. It was quite peculiar. There was a spot in the wall, a small indentation shaped like a fish. But...she was with Gray a second ago wasn't she? When did she get here?

She continued walking between the areas until she found a vase with a single rose within it. Reaching out and gently taking it as if it was beckoning her, she lifted it out of the vase and looked it over. It was a peach color. When she decided to pick off a petal at random a sharp pain went through her chest. "That's strange..." Like Lucy, she felt magical energy flowing around the petals, but she recognized bits of it as her own. "This is quite strange..."

-0-0-0-

Natsu looked around in the small corridor he found himself in not long after the lights flickered. It was a green room with several insect paintings. Quite strange. He glanced around. There was really only two ways to go and when he peeked inside of the door he found himself next to, he found a gap in the floor he didn't bother crossing. Paying no heed to the warning sign and not actually getting close to the walls, he waltzed on through the room, but found that door locked too. "Damn it, I'm stranded!"

Not a moment later, Natsu noticed a vase with a rose and a rose yet to bloom within it. The bloomed rose was a fiery orange while the one waiting to bloom was white from what he could tell. Something in him made him feel like he needed to keep them safe. He gently took them out of the vase and glanced down at them. He jerked his head up and looked around, "Happy?"

But wait..Happy couldn't be there, he was with Lucy. What was going on?

-0-0-0-

"Where the hell is this?" Garry asked shakily. "When did we wake up?" They awoke in an area colored red. Not long after waking up, they found a vase with two flowers within it, a blue rose and a light pink rose. Garry gently touched one of the petals of the blue rose to see if they were real, and well enough, they were. "Random roses?"

"We need to be careful. Neither you nor I have a clue as to what could happen here." Gray warned. Like all the other fellow wizards, the presence of magic energy resided in one of the roses..the pink one. "Be really careful."

"Yeah, I got it." Garry said quietly. "Let's go this way..."

-0-0-0-

Lucy and Ib walked into the room behind the door the table was blocking. Inside the room was a pleasant enough looking painting with a plaque reading "When the rose wilts, so too will you wilt away..." She read out loud. She looked down at the roses in her hand. With some quick guessing, she figured out that their lives were connected to these roses. She looked down at the rose and seeing as only one of them held magic energy, she assumed it to be her own and thus gave the red rose to Ib.

"Ib, I need you to keep this safe. Make sure nothing happens to it." Lucy warned. The young girl nodded quietly. Lucy looked down on the floor and saw a key lay beneath the painting and she decided to pick that up as well. "Let's see what we can do from here, okay?"

Lucy looked back up at the painting to see that it had changed. It's eyes were opened wide and instead of the relaxed face it had a creepy grin. Sure enough, the first thing the girl did was scream. She stumbled backwards and fell on her butt.

"Miss, Lucy, are you okay?"

Lucy looked at Ib when she asked that. _How is this little girl not scared? _Sure, Ib had been a bit startled, but that was more because of Lucy's scream than the painting.

"Yeah, I'm okay..." She pulled her bag off her back to peek in on Happy. "Happy, you okay in there?"

Happy popped his head out and gasped for air, "Lucy! It's so hot in there and it's really hard to breathe! And you were moving so much I feel so dizzy! Hey, where are we? Wasn't the gallery white? AH! That painting's scary!"

Ib didn't seem very phased at the sight of the speaking cat, she just stared at him. After staring for a bit she looked up at Lucy, "Lucy, we should go..."

Lucy nodded, "Yeah..."

The two stood and started walking down the hall.

_THIEF! THIEF! THIEF!_

The word 'Thief' was written across the wall. Soon enough, they found a door and Lucy jammed the key into the keyhole hearing a very satisfying click when it unlocked. She opened the door and let Ib in first.

"Who's there?" A male voice called.

Lucy smiled, "Natsu!"

* * *

**When deciding the rose colors for the Fairy Tail characters, I referred to three different websites****to be sure that the meanings behind the roses fit what I can see in the characters'...characters...as the colors of roses are limited and I'm new to writing these characters, please excuse some of the odd meanings.**

**COLORS:**

**Natsu - Orange**

**Happy - White**

**Lucy - Yellow w/ Red Tips**

**Erza - Peach**

**Gray - Light Pink**


End file.
